HAIRY rocker Scott Hutchison is ready to slip into a bikini to work with Calvin Harris.

The frontman of Frightened Rabbit is from Selkirk and Calvin, who teamed up with Rihanna for We Found Love, is from Dumfries, also from the south of Scotland.

It would be a match made in anthem heaven. Calvin is known for his hands-in-the-air tunes and Frightened Rabbit are the big beating heart of Scottish rock – a tear-inducing mix of The Proclaimers and Biffy Clyro.

Scott, who joked that Mumford & Sons stole his “chubby belly and beard” look, said: “We’ve never bumped into him but I think a song with Calvin would be fun.

“I could do a sexy video mucking about in fields in a bikini,” he joked.

As the band get ready for the release of their major label debut album next year, they are on a short tour before hitting Europe and America for the rest of the year.

And despite coming from Selkirk, they will play the town for the first time on September 25 at the Victoria Hall as well as Dumfries’s The Venue the night before.

Scott, whose brother Grant is the drummer in the band, said: “We’ve never got it together to play Selkirk.

“To be honest I was always worried that when I got back and went to the pub I’d get nasty stares and people saying: ‘there’s that a***hole who thinks he’s an international rock star,” but all I get is ‘I really love your stuff’. I never expected that level of love from the town. It's been really encouraging. It’s time to get back.

“And my mum and dad can’t be bothered to travel to Edinburgh any more.”

His mum gave him the nickname Frightened Rabbit as a child, when she kept him back a year at nursery because he was so chronically shy.

He adopted the name when he started making music in 2003. His brother joined the next year and now the band includes bassist Billy Kennedy, guitarist Andy Monaghan and guitarist and keyboard player Gordon Skene. They released debut album Sing the Greys on their own label in 2006 and knocked back an offer from Fiction Records, the home of Elbow, Snow Patrol and The Maccabees.

Their second and third albums, The Midnight Organ Fight and The Winter of Mixed Drinks, are emotive sing-alongs – part indie, part folk – that have seen them play the Hogmanay party in front of 80,000 people and sign to Atlantic for their fourth album, out next year – a decade after Scott began performing solo shows.

If you believe in the stars, they are aligned for Frightened Rabbit to make it big. Like Biffy, they were a huge cult band and it was the Ayrshire trio’s fourth album and major label debut Puzzle in 2007 that broke them into the big time.

The two bands are big pals and FR will support Biffy at the iTunes Festival on September 22. Scott said: “We’ve had no Bono-style pep talk from the guys but we have learned from them because of the way they conduct themselves. They still have the same crew they’ve had for years and, despite their massive success, their feet are still on the ground. I don’t feel any difference that we are on a major label.”

The man who has given majors a wide berth for years has nothing but praise for Atlantic. He said: “They didn’t plough in with ‘we are going to make you the biggest band in the world and we are going to make you rich’. They just said ‘we want to take what you’ve got and what you’ve achieved and amplify it a bit’.

“They also didn’t want to change our sound, which I was surprised about. They just left us to make the record we wanted to make.”

There have been changes. Usually Scott has written all the words and music but the Atlantic cash gave them the chance to write in two houses in Selkirk and Kingussie over three periods. It meant they created the music as a band – making the new songs more raw and powerful.

Scott said: “We have written a band record. It used to be just me but I was repeating myself. I’m much more at ease with the music now.”

Frightened Rabbit’s EP, State Hospital is out on September 25, the same day they play Victoria Hall, Selkirk. They’re at The Venue, Dumfries, the previous evening.